Mr James Potter goes for a Walk
by Passion Leech
Summary: This was my first shot at writing about James Potter. It isn't compelted and it won't be. I got off to the bad start of describing the character's thoughts rather than showing them. However, feedback would still be appreciated.


Mr. James Potter was a tall man of thirty-five with a volatile shock of black hair upon his head and the scrubby remains of a hasty shave on his jaw. His eyebrows were dark and arched, his nose pointy and crinkled with allergies, his lips thin and chapped. He wore glasses; copper-rimmed and slightly too large for his face, framing hazel eyes that were quick, keen and pleasant. He wore a finely knitted set of robes over his thin frame and walked at an average pace despite wanting to go faster. He had been badly injured in his athletic heyday and now had to contend with a lame left leg and arm. Nevertheless, (though it would not give him any satisfaction) any observant person walking by him on this street would have commended Mr. Potter on his progress. The entirety of his disability was not tremendously obvious: Mr. Potter had made a habit of placing the hand of his bad arm into the left pocket of his robes – all his robes had left pockets – so as not to let it hang uncomfortably. His leg, however, was much more burdensome and he disliked having to use it. Of course, it got stubbornly used rather a lot anyway. Today, it was being used to take him to Flourish and Blotts.

Diagon Alley, the street on which this bookstore is located, is generally a cheerful place. On a Saturday morning the narrow corridor of shops bustles with vendors, buyers and others who have decidedly had enough of their weekday drabble and fancy stretching their legs a bit. You are likely to see the odd pair of old wizards rowing nonsensically over the quality of their purchases and will more than likely have to dodge some scampering children that make sport of winding their ways through the labyrinth of moving bodies. Sometimes, an artist or a musician will try their luck on the cobbled street but this has never developed into a trend. Although located in London, Diagon Alley has both the charm and obstinacy of a small English village – the inhabitants of which find enough ways to create their own supply of nuisances and, frankly, a foreign caricaturist or a lute player would be too much competition.

Today, however, this place was heavy with an unusually mundane feeling. Its sparse visitors were not significantly less cheerful, granted it being a Tuesday, but the air was rather cold for a day in April and the garbage collectors had come to do their rounds. The sniffles did not liven things up either. Mr. Potter searched his pockets irritably for a tissue. Nothing. He would have to keep on sniffling, then. Mr. Potter had a terrible habit of under-preparing himself for outings such as this. He had thought vaguely this morning back at the house that he should probably take some tissues along because the heavy rain the night before was likely to have left a detritus of pollen in the air. The tissues were in the inside pocket of his spring overcoat. But then, feeling vaguely spiteful of the small control these tissues had over his comfort, he promptly disposed of the nagging thought and limped out of the door in his knitted robes.

Suppressing an imminent chill, Mr. Potter halted by a muddy patch of flowers in front of a restaurant patio, turned, and looked down the cobble-stone strip he had been walking. Someone's dog had gotten loose and was trotting dismally after one of the garbage collectors. Mr. Potter followed the animal with his eyes for a moment and then, turning his back on the scene, continued on his way. Sometimes, he had to do this. The recent past was an inherently sad thing for Mr. Potter and he liked to salute its retreat into the endless stretch of past things before it dwindled in his memory and perhaps disappeared forever. And in spite of his vague efforts, would he think of this walk again after today?

Mr. Potter hummed something out of tune to himself to shove off usurping thought. Perhaps forgetting was best after all. He could never be certain: these peculiar notions and feelings come and go like hues of dye through water. In a few hours, he would be at home again, talking to his wife about how the book chat went and feeling not particularly concerned about honouring fleeting memories of garbage-sniffing dogs. It was funny in a way, but his easily shifting thoughts troubled him.

He remembered how, as a boy, theories had been laws, speculations had been convictions, motivations had been the spurns of virtues. He had been foolish, yes, but how wonderful it felt for truth to seem attainable. In his most pessimistic state, Mr. Potter would reflect on his youth with the scorn of a modernist looking back on the ideals of the nineteenth century but this was not his regular view. Rather, he held more accommodatingly that he had learned quite a lot in life since his boyhood and decided it would be unwise to limit himself to any narrow tract of ideas when, evidently, so many others existed successfully. Somewhere along the way Mr. Potter had become a diplomatic thinker. If he ever hoped to return to something resembling the fiery assurance of his youth, it would be through unifying and compromising different ideas. The problem was that a man could lose himself this way. Identity became fickle and Mr. Potter would have to content himself with inhabiting the lives of other people instead. Lyric poetry would never be an achievement of his. James Potter was a novelist and the lives he created on the page were not his own.

The book chat he was hobbling towards was for one of the few children's novels he had written. The book had developed out of stories he used to tell Harry and Elizabeth at bedtime:

At an early point in the writing process he had considered switching the sex of his protagonist to female in memory of Elizabeth but this did not hold. In the end, he had felt uncomfortable making her part of the story despite his wife's assurances that he would be doing their daughter an honour. They had rowed over it, even


End file.
